Safire: There's some swingin', fightin' in 'battleground states'

ON LANGUAGE

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, October 3, 2004

If there is one area of total agreement among political thumb-suckers of every stripe, it is that the 2004 presidential election will be won or lost in the battleground states.

California and New York? Fuhgeddaboutem. They go in the blue-state column. Texas and South Carolina? Sure-thing red states.

"What they did in Florida in 2000," John Kerry warned the Congressional Black Caucus, "they may be planning to do in battleground states all across this country this year." Dick Cheney told a town hall meeting in Milwaukee: "Wisconsin is an extraordinarily important state. It's a battleground state." Those are two of the 10 or so states in which the majority of advertising money of both campaigns is being spent.

These are the swing states, their electoral votes to be determined by the mysterious swing voter — that person pollsters count upon not to be counted upon.

Although Kerry said with some gallantry, "We're not dividing this country into red states and blue states," he may be the only one who's not.

Let us now delve into the etymology of these recent additions to the American language.

For red state/blue state, I have in hand Hatchet Jobs and Hardball (Oxford, $25), a new dictionary of political slang. Though the editor, Grant Barrett, provides no context for his entries, the citations often define themselves. Perhaps because color television was not universal until a generation ago, electoral maps were not consistent until the campaign of the first President Bush against Bill Clinton.

But on Oct. 15, 1992, a Boston Globe writer noted, "But when the anchormen turn to their electronic tote boards election night and the red states for Clinton start swamping the blue states for Bush, this will be a strange night for me." (By digging further on the Web, the reader can find that the coiner, or at least an early user, was David Nyhan, then of the Globe staff.)

On Nov. 5 of that year, after the results were in, USA Today reported someone (I'm not going to keep looking up these citations) saying, "I think it shows the lack of historical memory pundits have ... They're a lot more excited because they see a lot more blue states than red states."

That poses (not begs) the question: Why are Republicans red and Democrats blue?

In France in the 1780s, revolutionaries sported a red cockade; in the European revolutions of 1848, "Red Republicans" advocated the use of force to overthrow governments and red became the color of communism. The Times of London wrote in 1848 about the battle in France "of the red Republic, as the Ultras there call themselves, against the blue — colours being used to designate the parties as much in provincial France as in our counties in England."

(A nice find, but somehow that doesn't strike me as the reason that solidly GOP states in the United States are colored red on maps. Sometimes, as Sigmund Freud is said to have said, a cigar is just a cigar.)

But what about the battleground states — where does that come from? Unfortunately, that is not covered in Barrett's dictionary, nor can it be found in the much more exhaustive 1993 edition of Safire's Political Dictionary, which I'm too busy to update.

I first heard the phrase uttered by John Mitchell, the Nixon campaign manager in 1968, regarding the states in the upper Midwest, but I didn't make a note of it then, so that's not a solid citation. But thanks to my intrepid researcher, Elizabeth Phillips — and the Library of Congress' American Memory database at www.memory.
loc.gov — we have a coinage that will be hard for any lexicographer to antedate.

Schuyler Colfax was an Indiana congressman, later House speaker and vice president under Ulysses S. Grant. On May 18, 1860, he wrote to Abraham Lincoln of neighboring Illinois — then a candidate for the Republican nomination for president — that although he preferred Edward Bates, "I have had no doubt that your name was the most hopeful, around which to rally in the doubtful battleground states. Your being born in Kentucky is, of itself, a great point in your favor."

Colfax was later implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal but should now be remembered by historians as the coiner of battleground states.

In those states, you will recall, resides the swing voter, which came before swing state. Lexicographer Barrett tracks this description of an undecided voter to an Oct. 11, 1958, observation in The New York Times: "The Republican problem in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia is to capture Democratic and swing voters to add to the usual Republican minorities." Checking the New York Times archives reveals the author — my old Op-Ed colleague the columnist Russell Baker — whose observation remains pertinent today. (Swing voters, it should be noted, are never called swingers; those are people who can do wild things in voting booths.)

While splashing about in the archives, I found an earlier use of swing voter, equally apt. The Washington Post reported in 1956 that the GOP candidate running for re-election as vice president said in Ohio that he was trying to "appeal to swing voters, whom we must have to win not only the presidency, which I am sure we will win, but also to elect congressmen and senators." To do that, Richard Nixon was certain "it is essential to have a type of campaign persuasive to independents and Democrats."

Since we have achieved color conformity among the mapmakers regarding sure-thing red and blue states, can we now agree upon a color for swing voters in battleground states? My recommendation: no color at all. In that way, we would have red, white and blue states. Just a thought.

Safire is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the New York Times, based in Washington, D.C.